Alternative Ruby grammar

[Markus Liedl]

I thought your name looked familiar -- you were the lead on the
"Carbone" project to build a gforth/vmgen based Ruby virtual machine,
right? Have you picked that up again, and is this part of it?

No, it's not part of it. I'm starting from scratch again.
Along the lines of David Ungars SOAR and Ian Piumartas thesis; from
parse
tree directly to machine code.

 

[Markus Liedl]

Well I didn't ever benchmark MRI's parser before writing this grammar.
The problem for any other parser is that it is blindingly fast. Still
I don't believe speed is that important. To give you at least one
number: One my specific hardware, the C parser groks around 3 MBytes
of Ruby code per second. Does this seem fast or slow to you?

With careful work one may make the C parser maybe two times faster,
maybe more. I don't think I will spend my time on that.

I've checked in a file pending-optimizations.txt. I won't work
on that for now but at least its written up somewhere.

 

[Sean O'Halpin]

If MRI is considered the gold standard, then obviously it's 100%
correct. Of course, it can't be considered the gold standard, since
minor things change from release to release; so I'd say all parsers
would be some percentage of "complete" given some
implementation-independent definition of "Ruby".

But perhaps that's just my opinion It's hard to say anyone is
"correct" when there's no language specification.

- Charlie

Thanks for the clarification. I guess that's the problem with a de
facto vs a de jure standard - it can be a moving target.

By the way, the progress you're making on JRuby really is a delight - great job.

Regards,
Sean